Michael Vick’s Lost Dogs

With quarterback Kevin Kolb recovering from a concussion, Michael Vick will start an N.F.L regular-season game for the first time since 2006 on Sunday when the Eagles visit the Detroit Lions. If that happens, it will mark another second chance in a line of many for Vick, who after serving twenty-three months following his guilty plea to federal dogfighting charges in 2007, signed a two-year contract with Philadelphia last summer. That signing was accompanied by some backlash, from fans and animal-rights organizations, who felt that Vick hadn’t atoned enough to once again be a multi-millionaire. A year later, the controversy surrounding Vick is just an old-fashioned football one—a quarterback controversy—hotly debated, surely, but about neither morality nor justice.

For a while, it looked as though the forty-nine pit bulls rescued from Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels operation in Virginia weren’t going to get the same second chance. As Jim Gorant writes in his new book, “The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption,” fighting dogs are often so physically and psychologically damaged that they must be put down. In the Vick case, even the Humane Society and PETA initially advised the government, which had seized the dogs, that euthanasia was the most compassionate course of action. In this well-researched, moving account, Gorant tells the story of the government officials and dedicated volunteers who rejected this assessment, and instead evaluated each dog on its merits, saving forty-two in the process.

While this is a story about people, investigations, and laws, it is also a story about dogs. With sporadic success, Gorant writes from the point of view of the dogs, conjuring their likely feelings of terror and confusion, but also of joy. Though this anthropomorphism sometimes falls flat, Gorant’s obvious affection for the dogs finally trumps such literary qualms. He fiercely defends the pit bull against allegations that they are “uncontrollable and bloodthirsty,” citing evidence that “free of negative influences, they’re not much different from any other breed.” The conditions survived by the Bad Newz dogs left many of them afraid of other dogs and afraid of people, but rarely were they dangerous or aggressive. Instead they were like any dogs: “Something deep inside of them, woven into the very fabric of their being, a genetic impulse, compels them to please those around them.” Though Gorant notes that many of the Vick dogs have made slow progress in sanctuary care, others have thrived, becoming beloved pets and caring volunteer animals. In the photographs below, we can see just what a second chance looks like.